Right from the beginning, the authors make it clear who is the main audience of the book. Designers and production managers – people who decide how the final product should look like. My own perspective is quite different. Usually, I make all decisions regarding book development on my own, taking the client’s input into account. From cover design to book format, from binding style to brand of paper used to make a book block.Continue reading →

This January in the capital city of Estonia Alexander Vasin and Natalia Velchinskaya have produced a new course – Tallinn Laboratoria. Alexander and Natalia are creators of many typography and book design courses, both in Moscow and abroad. This time they’ve brought a group of students to study in a local print house Labora Tallinna Paber.Continue reading →

Every month I add new blogs to my feed. It is really inspiring to see all these fine people writing about bookbinding and book conservation tricks, their projects and thoughts. At the same moment, it becomes harder to filter links for our monthly digest — there is just too much I’d like to share with you!Continue reading →

This Sunday I had a third gold tooling class at my workshop. Once again I wasn’t a teacher, but a student. I’m really glad I had a chance to arrange this series of lessons at my studio and join them to learn something new.Continue reading →

Last Sunday I’ve tried an unusual role. For 18 months, since my studying days at the American Academy of Bookbinding in July 2015, I’ve been a teacher. Now, however, I became a student once again. Another important thing was that there was a new teacher in my own workshop — a gold tooling and book restoration master Eduard Illarionov.Continue reading →

This video shows not only the process of gold tooling, there are all the preparation steps mentioned and described in the initial part of the video. I don’t think that’s enough to educate yourself on how gold tooling is done. However, it may help you to refresh the memory.Continue reading →